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A couple of months ago, BJ and I visited our friend and nearby neighbor Bradley at his studio located at the University of Houston. It came at the tail end of his MFA thesis show, and we were so excited to see his sketches and other show going on upstairs. Stepping into his space, I was immediately flooded with memories of my undergrad studio and I hit with a little bit of envy. I miss having a small space, piles of books, scraps and little mementos that seemed to precious to throw away but their fate still undecided. I love his use of color and pattern, refreshing take on still-lifes, and the textures of his collage and paintings especially those made by scraping thin lines into the wet paint. The first piece is one our favorites, a sweet save the date Bradley created for his and Whitney’s upcoming wedding. Check out more of his work here. As I approach my two months of summer break, I feel motivated to carve out a space of my own and create.

One of the highlights of working at Myth and Symbol has to be meeting creative people and getting to share their beautiful work with others. When I bought a bowl last year from an event at the craft center, I knew I had to track down whoever made it. By coincidence, Angel happened to come by the shop before I could contact her down and everything came together from there. Soon after, I got to know Anne, her best friend and another local talent. So we brainstormed a little bit and next Saturday, they’ll be at the store with all their goods. If you are around, please come visit before I buy everything!

2nd photo by angel

Here’s a flyer I put together for them. I’m still brushing up doing layout and text, but the doodles were fun!

I love when people share their process. Sometimes it’s a struggle for my kids to generate multiple, different ideas for a project and it helps when they see professionals do it too. These book cover thumbnails from some of my favorite illustrators are just as good as the final images themselves.

Last night, we went to the MFAH’s French Fete celebrating the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces from the National Gallery of Art. The super long lines and crowded galleries was still worth it, but we’ll definitely come back and use our comp tickets later to slowly take everything in. I’m probably late on recognizing this but there are so many dogs sweetly placed in Impressionist paintings! I spotted them in at least 8-10 paintings including one of our favorites Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Arm Chair.

National Gallery of Art

And from their permanent collection, I’m always in awe with the Greek Myrtle Wreath c330-250 B.C and a few of the sculptures on the first floor.

I recently picked up Print’s 20 under 30 issue, and Jeseok Yi‘s work most intensely spoke to me. Social design that looks cool, informs,compels the viewer to take action, and lingers in the mind for minutes, days, etc. is usually hard to come by. An exciting aspect of Yi’s work has nothing to do with “making type look great and doing Photoshop like a machine”—heavy on digital technique, light on ideas. Rather, it’s the way Yi stresses the simplicity and interaction between design and its real-world environment. I think his work will speak to my students too.

On a slightly similar note, thank you, Jennifer for the smart reminder/tip about helping with Japan’s long term earthquake relief efforts, especially as we continue to learn more about the aftermath and where help is most needed.

What drives Gregory Thielker and Alexandra Pacula? Their styles of oil painting are shaped by photography and filtered through car windows. Both pay homage to an instrument praised for transparently rendering reality—yet their paintings withhold the straightforward picture you would expect. They like to place obstacles between the observer and observed. Thielker chooses rain, bringing photorealistic detail to drenched windshields, an everyday scenario where unmediated vision might actually save your life. Pacula, by contrast, chooses a style of blurring that mimics the woozy smears of long-exposed film. These artists tilt representation toward abstraction, one extracting vitality from stillness and silence, the other turning the commotion of real life into the repose of pure color.

Gregory Thielker shows us a world lighted less by the sun than by the red glare of brake lights and traffic lights. It’s an overcast, halted place. Here everything—which is to say, nothing—seems to occur under rain clouds or the cover of nightfall. If we’re not waiting on the road, we’re in parking lots. This inert realm outside the vehicle is refracted through patterns of rainwater: waxy droplets, lattices, and sheets of rippling liquid. Thielker’s lyrically fractured vision lends a sense of mystery and activity, a fugitive spark of life, to the quiet routine of a country locked in its own cars.

Alexandra Pacula gazes outward from a quintessentially New York point of view: a taxicab window. She presents a sunless setting, too, though in her images we find more headlights, neon signage, and peeks into brightly lit interiors. Lights, in other words, that approach us and invite us in. Little can be seen clearly because the passage of time blurs and bends the scenes like memories. Clarity doesn’t attract Pacula. She prefers the delights of the deceiving mind—and camera. Watching the glow of storefronts and passing cars and street lamps melt into twitchy trails of color, after all, one thinks of long-exposure photographs and their disloyalty to reality. Her paintings likewise rebel. They side against the frenzy and fluorescent vertigo of the city at night, rebuilding blandly busy moments as absolute visual spaces into which the beholder can escape.

I remember working at a show in Boston and seeing Steven and William Ladd’s Ant War Box wishing I could one day own a little piece of their work. The closest I’ve come: picking up the issue of American Craft with the feature on the Ladd brothers. Their new Colony necklace finally brings their one-of-a-kind work within reach (of my budget).